brannonkrkhuang's review against another edition
5.0
This book is brilliant and excellent and everything else. I love it.
sfx_naike's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
5.0
zhollows's review against another edition
4.0
“Humbly now, with no vaulting dream of achieving a vast unity, I wanted to try to build a bridge of words between me and that world outside. That world that was so distant and illusive that is seemed unreal. I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo. And if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words; to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all. To keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human.”
shelleebee's review against another edition
4.0
Richard Wright's memoir makes the Jim Crow south feel like a waking nightmare. The details about Chicago and the racism that created the segregation of the city seem both foreign and completely relevant to the 21st century. His description of the Communist party of the 1930s and its support of Blacks but ultimate failure was also interesting. Wright is a lonely child, young man, and adult, terrorized by the violence and oppression that surround him but eager to make a change. His only solace comes through literature. A serious young man, he works tenaciously to leave the south and then to earn a living through writing. This book is an excellent companion to his novel Native Son and a riveting historical look at post-emancipation enslavement of Blacks.
bloodyfool0's review against another edition
4.0
He's not trying to sell anyone. All he's doing is telling us about his upbringing and experiences in life growing up as a black American. His interactions not only with his kind but White people also. Truthfully admits to his wrongdoings and his reflections on the things he shouldn't have done.
Stands firm in his beliefs which arises not so much by the influences of those around him but BOOKS! Yes his obsession with reading is obvious and that's one of the best ways to reflect on your life, by reading.
Did I say he reads so well. Yes, it is immersive and you get brought into his world - no judgments, mere understanding of this gifted author.
Stands firm in his beliefs which arises not so much by the influences of those around him but BOOKS! Yes his obsession with reading is obvious and that's one of the best ways to reflect on your life, by reading.
Did I say he reads so well. Yes, it is immersive and you get brought into his world - no judgments, mere understanding of this gifted author.
aamccartan's review against another edition
3.0
I really liked this--powerfully written and moving. I liked part one a lot better (hence the three stars), and found part two overly focused on Communism...but still good.
bradley_pough's review against another edition
5.0
I really wish I had read this one sooner. This is the kind of book you come back to many times over and each time discover some new insight or nugget that you completely missed the last time around. Loosely based on Richard Wright's life, Black Boy tells the story of a young man's escape from the Jim Crow South to Chicago in the early 1900's. And yet, while this book takes the form of an autobiography, describing it as the story of Richard Wright's life seems to miss the point. It is, instead, the story of a mind evolving as it interacts with the world around it.
That mind -- inhabiting the body of a young black man -- struggles throughout the book to make itself known to the external world on its own terms. But that world has its own agenda and its own conception of who "Richard" is. The black world has one understanding, the white world another, the Southern world something else, the Communist world something else still. Those conceptions of Richard are almost entirely uninfluenced by the "mind" inside of Richard's head narrating the tale. The book is, therefore, the story of how that mind comes to grips with the fact that it hardly understands the world around it and that the world around it has almost no interest in actually understanding the mind.
In this way Black Boy reminds me of Richard Wright's description of his short story "The Voodoo of Hell's Half Acre" -- "It was crudely atmospheric, emotional, intuitively psychological, an stemmed from pure feeling." Although the book is so much more than that, it does feel more like the autobiography of Richard Wright's id as opposed to the story of the man himself -- raw, emotional, and cerebral.
Indeed, Black Boy recalled for me W.E.B. Dubois's theory of "double consciousness" -- the idea that African Americans move through the world as divided parts of a whole person. We are both the person who the world sees and the person in our heads who sees the world. I always thought that the double consciousness theory was a not only a powerful encapsulation of the black experience, but the human experience and Wright's "Black Boy" turns Dubios's theory into a tangible and relatable narrative. Definitely worth the read.
That mind -- inhabiting the body of a young black man -- struggles throughout the book to make itself known to the external world on its own terms. But that world has its own agenda and its own conception of who "Richard" is. The black world has one understanding, the white world another, the Southern world something else, the Communist world something else still. Those conceptions of Richard are almost entirely uninfluenced by the "mind" inside of Richard's head narrating the tale. The book is, therefore, the story of how that mind comes to grips with the fact that it hardly understands the world around it and that the world around it has almost no interest in actually understanding the mind.
In this way Black Boy reminds me of Richard Wright's description of his short story "The Voodoo of Hell's Half Acre" -- "It was crudely atmospheric, emotional, intuitively psychological, an stemmed from pure feeling." Although the book is so much more than that, it does feel more like the autobiography of Richard Wright's id as opposed to the story of the man himself -- raw, emotional, and cerebral.
Indeed, Black Boy recalled for me W.E.B. Dubois's theory of "double consciousness" -- the idea that African Americans move through the world as divided parts of a whole person. We are both the person who the world sees and the person in our heads who sees the world. I always thought that the double consciousness theory was a not only a powerful encapsulation of the black experience, but the human experience and Wright's "Black Boy" turns Dubios's theory into a tangible and relatable narrative. Definitely worth the read.